Restoring an event from a half dead hard drive

Hi all. Here's my dilemma: I have an event from 2 days of shooting. My backup drive only has the first day of footage. Since there's no good way to update a backup copy without copying the whole thing again, I was set to do just that. Then the drive with 2 days of shooting (and all the synced audio compound clips) failed to mount. Finally, after several attempts and reboots, it mounted. But it warned me that the drive cannot be written to or repaired and that I should backup any data on that drive and then reformat. So, I opened FCP X (latest version, 10.1.1) to copy it over but it wouldn't open the library on the bad drive. My only option seemed to be to copy the folder inside the library... thingy. I'm not sure what you call that new icon with the four stars. Anyway, I selected "show package contents" and found the event and copied that whole folder over to the good drive. I replaced the same un-updated event with the copied, updated event folder on the good drive. I opened FCP to find it had the updated file icons there, but they were all "missing" when I tried to play them. Naturally, I tried to relink them and no clips were turning up in the list of files to relink.

Is there a way to import an event, where all the necessary files are in place, into FCP? I can't seem to figure it out on my own. Thanks a bunch!

Quick update: I found this helpful article with a fix to my dilemma. I followed the instructions (second paragraph after the image of the library view) and the files appear in the event, kind of. Most of the files show up as "missing" until I hover over them and they seem to play fine. I can even drop them into the storyline of a new project. And my synced compound clips are showing up as well. However, the projects for the event are not showing up. Hmm...

prismvideopro.com/blog/2014/1/29/fcpx-10...ries-file-management

Another update: Using the same procedure as described in the article I linked to, I was able to restore the projects. Hooray! Of course, all the files still appear to be missing, even though that aren't and are seemingly working just fine. By the way, they are only appearing missing in the event view, not in the storyline. Strange, but I'm at least happy I can continue to work.

I hope this is useful to someone else!

I would not trust your library that you managed to rescue from a failing drive. Its databases could be corrupt in some unpredictable way. Instead, create a brand new library. Then go into your old library and export XMLs of the events, and then re-import them into your new library.

Carbon Copy Cloner can do "appended" backups, meaning only stuff not on the backup is "added" to the backup, no having to copy the whole drive over and over.

And yes, if a drive is wonky, replace it ASAP.

haysoos123, thanks for good advice. I didn't think about the possibility of corrupted files. Luckily, I have the original files still on their cards, if I have to resort to using those. But my library on my bad drive won't open in FCP, so I can't export the XMLs, I don't think.